Stop Abbas

January 18, 2013 By Erin Clare

As the child of parents who survived the concentration camps, I have dedicated my academic career and my clerical calling to educate the next generation to learn the lessons of the Nazi horrors. The first lesson of the Holocaust is that the murder of six million Jews in 21 nations did not begin with an edict to cast the Jews into the ovens. It began with a policy of demonizing the Jews as if they were less than human. Throughout WWII, the exiled Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al Husseini, operated out of Hitler’s bunker and broadcast ranting in Arabic that called for the murder of the Jews. This daily radio message was beamed to the Middle East, while the Mufti actively recruited Arabs to join SS units that systematically rounded up and executed thousands of Jewish families in the Balkans.

On Jan. 4, Mahmud Abbas, the leader of what the U.N. has defined as the State of Palestine, issued a speech in which he praised the legacy of the Mufti of Jerusalem and the Arabs who have murdered Jews over the past generation. To ignore Abbas’s message is ignore the first lesson of the Holocaust, which is that anyone who glorifies those who murder Jews is to be held culpable in the advocacy of mass murder.

It is therefore incumbent on every person of conscience to condemn Abbas and to break off all relations with him and the entity that he represents. … There is an adage in the Talmud that states, silence is agreement.